Heterogeneity-aware optimal power allocation in data center environments

Abstract

Data centers generally consume an enormous amount of energy, which not only increases the running cost but also simultaneously enhances their greenhouse gas emissions. Given the rising costs of power, many companies are looking for the solutions of best usage of the available power. However, most of the previous works only address this problem in the homogeneous environments. Considering the increasing popularity of heterogeneous data centers, this paper investigates how to distribute limited power among multiple heterogeneous servers in a data center so as to maximize performance. Specifically, we optimize the power allocation in two case: single-class service case and multiple-class service case. In each case, we develop an algorithm to find the optimal solution and demonstrate numerical data of the analytical method respectively. The simulation results show that our proposed approach is efficient and accurate for the performance optimization problem at the data center level. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.